February 5, 2015 Are There Jewish Interests? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Are There Jewish Interests?

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Luke Ford

I consider it as obvious as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west that different groups have different interests that frequently clash.

For instance, it is in black and latino interests in the United States that there be high taxation on high earners to pay for generous welfare programs as blacks and latinos tend to reside at the lowest levels of the socio-economic spectrum, proportionately take more welfare than do whites and asians, and proportionately have fewer members of their group earning high incomes and possessing great wealth. So strong taxes on wealth to subsidize the poor is in the interests of blacks and latinos in the United States.

What are asian interests in America? Avoiding public discussion of racial differences as asians tend to be more intelligent, more law abiding, and more prosperous than other races and open discussion of this could stir resentment. Avoiding public discussion of group loyalties is also in the asian interest as many asians in America, even if they were born here, feel more loyalty to their home countries of China, Japan, Korea, Philippines, etc than they do to America and this would be inconvenient if if were publicly discussed and America began acting rationally in its national self-interest. Public discussion of group interests is against the interests of every minority group in America, including asians. It is probably in Asian-Americans interests that whites don’t develop group interests in taking back a homogeneous white United States. Affirmative action is against asian interests. Law and order is in asian interests.

What are in white interests? Throughout the world, whites tend to vote for lower taxes, less welfare, strong law and order, and against affirmative action, because these policies are in the white interest.

What are Muslims interests in America? Freedom of religion, freedom from discrimination, freedom from group criticism, hate crime legislation, these are all in the Muslim interest in America today along with the interests of other similarly low IQs folks such as most blacks and latinos who want generous welfare and high taxation on high earners.

So are there Jewish interests? Yes. Jews are particularly concerned with the well-being of Israel. They’re increasingly skeptical of affirmative action and welfare and high taxation. They’re pro civil rights, pro gay, and pro oppressed minorities because they see themselves as a vulnerable minority. It’s in the Jewish interest to have Jews in important positions in society while simultaneously stigmatizing any discussion of Jewish influence and Jewish interests, aka ending the careers of all those who bring these things up.

It may well be in the Jewish interest to stigmatize any discussion of race being real because that might lead to discussion of whether every type of race is equally suited for living in the United States. It may well be in the Jewish interest to stigmatize whites from developing white interests because a homogeneous white America, like a homogeneous Nazi Germany, may well be hostile to Jewish interests. Almost all white nationalists hate Jews and almost all Jews hate white nationalists.

During the 1930s, there were Jewish interests in combating Nazi Germany and in shouting down anyone who talked about the existence of such things as Jewish interests.

A mature society would welcome free and open discussion of group interests.

Posted in Asians, Blacks, Jews, Kevin MacDonald | Comments Off

The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Luke Ford

Stephen Steinlight wrote in 2001:

It is critically important to state at the outset that this is neither to wax nostalgic (a culturally inconceivable stance) nor — Heaven forbid — to find redeeming features in the evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and Red Menace-based Great Pause in the 1920s that trapped hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe. My then-teenage father and his brothers, escaping the widespread bloody pogroms taking place throughout the Russian Empire during the civil war that followed the Revolution, were very nearly stranded by it and left to the tender mercies of General “Pogromchik” Petlyura’s Russian and Ukrainian Nationalist army. They managed to ship out of Danzig, walking to that Baltic port all the way from a small village outside Kiev, and get in just under the wire before the door slammed shut. Anyone familiar with the national/ethnic quotas that formed the basis for U.S. immigration policy in the years that followed will note not only their vilely discriminatory attitude toward Eastern and Southern Europeans (Jews most prominently), but also that even the tiny quotas allotted these undesirables were rarely met. So extreme was the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic restrictionist attitude.
America’s vast moral failure to offer refuge to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, a story told so powerfully by David S. Wyman in his two books and that of many subsequent historians, can never be forgotten. The story is told in the permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Museum, but with less prominence than it deserves, no doubt out of concern for appearing overly critical of the nation on whose national mall the museum stands. While the U.S. administration was fully informed how and where millions were being murdered in Europe, only a handful were grudgingly granted safety here. The story of the ship the St. Louis is perhaps the most poignant and widely known instance of this monstrous policy, but scores of Jews seeking refuge could tell equally appalling tales of grotesque treatment. Along with the trade in African slaves and the institution of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, America’s abandonment of the Jews to Nazi annihilation is arguably the greatest moral failure in its history. This shameful, frightening history has formed, as it were, the sacred moral basis for mainstream Jewish support for generous legal immigration.
But Jewish memories of the failure of U.S. refugee policy and a national-origins immigration policy abandoned some 36 years ago should no longer, can no longer, serve as the basis for communal thinking on this issue. We are, in the first instance, not speaking here of refugees from tyranny or oppressed minorities, but of vast numbers of immigrants seeking economic betterment, and, secondly, we are not advocating an anti-immigration position — far from it — but rather a sensible one that is consonant with the American dream. Put simply, what we are advocating is a pro-immigrant policy of lower immigration.
Also, let’s confess it: It would be ridiculous to mistake the organized Jewish community’s hesitancy to address the subject of the great cultural transformation of America for genuine equanimity. We are, after all, standing on the edge of what is arguably the most profound social transformation in the nation’s history. It is a demographic transformation that, most experts believe, will result in a majority non-white population sometime before the end of the new century. A new American nation is coming into being before our very eyes, and many in the Jewish world are worried about it; some are even terrified.
For the most part we continue to mouth the traditional policy line affirming generous — really, unlimited — immigration and open borders, though our own constituency is deeply divided on the policy, supports it with diminished enthusiasm, and even our legislative advocates seem to do so without conviction. Doubt has been growing for some years now. For those familiar with the behavior of mainstream Jewish organizations within the landscape of Washington-based coalitions, or for anyone with any mother wit, it is a commonplace that Jews find themselves on the political right with regard to almost any issue one might name on cold days in hell. But this has been regularly the case for at least nearly a decade at meetings of the National Immigration Forum, the key lobbying group for large-scale immigration, a group in which the Jewish organizations present are often alone in opposing what is, in essence, a policy of open borders.
Yet, for the time being, as if on automatic pilot, Jewish organizations repeat the familiar mantras and continue with their uncritical “celebration” of diversity. (Diversity meaning, of course, diversity of race and ethnicity but not opinion.) Like sleepwalkers, we instinctively plod along the corridors in the familiar patterns and pursue old-fashioned attempts at “dialogue” with the new constellation of groups while we attempt to get our arms around the New America. (Dialogue frequently being a one-way street where we strive to please our partners at any price, often reinforce stereotypes of Jewish money-grubbing and privilege by promising entrepreneurs of color entrée to business insiders and frequently ask for little in the way of concrete support for our own agenda in return.) Sometimes it also seems as if we’re trying to look like value-free sociologists and not give the slightest outward signs of the intense vertigo we’re experiencing or the least hint that we may be prepared to reconsider policy. Though we undoubtedly appear green around the gills to those who know us well. For a community that has long advanced an ambitious and unapologetic public agenda, and not infrequently in a rambunctious, in-your-face style, this hesitancy is striking and does not go unnoticed. If unchanged, in the long run it may also prove dangerous.

Posted in Immigration, Jews, Stephen Steinlight | Comments Off

Police, Prisons & The Color Of Crime

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Luke Ford

From the 2005 book, The Color of Crime:

America’s changing racial and ethnic makeup has played a role in the rise in incarceration. The number of Hispanic and non-citizen prisoners is rising faster than the overall prison population. In 2003, there were 4.4 times as many prisoners as in 1980, but the Hispanic prison population rose 10 fold.58 Between 1990 and 2003, the total number of prisoners rose by 90 percent while the number of noncitizens in prison increased 4.8 fold.59 This means that the number of Hispanic and non-citizen prisoners is rising at more than twice the rate of the total prison population. Figure 24 shows the racial composition of the prisoner population in 2003—black: 44.1 percent; white: 35.0 percent; Hispanic: 19.0 percent; other: 1.9 percent.60 Some experts worry that the growing number of crimes committed by youth gangs have contributed to the leveling out of crime rates, and that the problem will only get worse.61 As we saw earlier, immigrants and their children are the main source of new gang members. The experience of the past several decades tells us that putting more people in prison reduces crime. The cost, however, is very high. In inflation-adjusted dollars, in 2001 the US spent three times as much on prisons as it did in 1980. Other policing costs are also rising rapidly. Many of the one million or more immigrants who come to the United States every year are from population groups that raise crime rates rather than lower them. The result is more crime or higher costs to control crime—or both.
Why Study Race and Crime?
Why study racial differences in crime rates? Many Americans believe this can lead only to invidious comparisons and scapegoating. Others resist the idea that there are significant group differences in crime rates, and believe that even if there are differences, society is to blame for not treating people of all races equally. Some scholars even suggest it may be better for Americans to remain ignorant of certain realities about race.63 This view is both obscurantist and patronizing: who is to decide which are the truths that must be withheld? Society does not benefit when information is suppressed. Truth and knowledge are always better than falsehood and ignorance. This report takes no position on causes of group differences in crime rates, except to point out that the ones that are most commonly proposed—poverty, unemployment, lack of education—are not satisfactory. As for the reality of those differences, the evidence is overwhelming: Blacks are considerably more likely than any other group to commit crimes of virtually all kinds, while Asians are least likely. Whites and Hispanics have intermediate crime rates. There can be debate about the exact extent of the differences—the data do not make these calculations easy—but differences are a fact. These differences are far greater than some that have given rise to significant public initiatives. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, and white household income is 60 percent higher than black household income. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to drop out of high school. Race differences of this kind have led to everything from affirmative action preferences to No Child Left Behind legislation. Americans are right to be concerned about these differences, but they are, relatively speaking, small. To repeat some of the more substantial differences in crime rates: Blacks are about eight times more likely than whites to commit murder, and 25 times more likely than Asians to do so. Blacks are 15 times more likely than whites to go to prison for robbery, and 50 times more likely than Asians. Crime reduction programs analogous to No Child Left Behind may or may not be practical, but no solutions will be found if we avert our eyes from these differences. A better understanding of the facts is important for other reasons. The evidence suggests that deeplyrooted assumptions about police bias are wrong. Many Americans believe that entire professions— police, prosecutors, judges—are systematically biased against minorities (critics usually have nothing to say about low incarceration rates for Asians, but if they were consistent they would argue that the police and the courts must be biased in favor of Asians). This is insulting and unfair. Not only does it reflect abiding prejudice against some of the most hard-working people in America, it leads to onerous anti-“racial profiling” regulations that require police to fill in detailed racial information about every traffic stop, stop-and-frisk, or search. Additional paperwork is a distraction from the job that really matters: stopping crime. Assumptions about police bias are especially common among minority groups that have the most to gain from good relations with the police. Blacks, in particular, are convinced of police “racism.” In extreme cases, this belief leads to murderous rampages like that of Brian Nichols with which this report begins. It is not an exaggeration to say that his victims might be alive today if the facts in this report were widely known. In countless less severe cases, a belief in police bias leads to suspicion, resentment, and lack of cooperation, all of which make it harder for the police to do their jobs, and more likely that minorities will suffer from crimes that could have been solved or prevented. How often do assumptions about police—and societal—racism so anger blacks that they go beyond lack of cooperation to crime itself? It is profoundly destructive for minorities to have exaggerated resentments toward the society in which they live. Uncritical repetition by whites of assertions about police bias only deepens these resentments. A proper understanding of crime rates also supports a common-sense understanding of race and is an antidote to hypocrisy. Americans do not know the exact statistics, but they know that whites (and Asians) are less likely than blacks to rob them. Even many people who insist that black arrest rates are bloated by police bias are careful to avoid certain neighborhoods. Group differences as great as those in this report are a reality that filters into public awareness even if the press seldom reports them. It is common to oppose publication of crime statistics for fear of creating “negative stereotypes,” but statistical differences are the basis for important policy decisions. If one airline were three times more likely than other airlines to be involved in fatal accidents, would it be reasonable to avoid it? If one brand of decongestant were twice as likely as another to have serious side effects, would the FDA be justified in investigating it? Many people pay for optional side airbags in automobiles. Does this cut the risk of death or injury in half? More than that? Less? People make choices, and risk affects their choices. If there are different risks associated with different groups of people it is legitimate to investigate and weigh those risks. Finally, immigration is rapidly changing the population of the United States. Thanks to immigration, Hispanics are now the nation’s largest minority group. Hispanics are one of the more crime-prone groups in America. They also have high rates of illegitimacy, school failure, poverty, welfare use, and teen pregnancy. Asians are lowest in all these categories. Is it wise for our immigration policies to ignore these differences?

Posted in Asians, Blacks, Crime, Jared Taylor, Latino, Whites | Comments Off

The Dancing Asian Girl

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Luke Ford

This shy 17yo Jewish kid is dating an Asian girl and it’s upsetting for him. She wants to go to parties where people drink smoke pot and he doesn’t like that. The police broke up the party for noise… One day she wants to kiss him, the next day she doesn’t. She’s all Gentile and all Hollywood and it’s confusing for him. She likes to dance with different guys and he doesn’t enjoy watching that. She loves male attention.

* I wonder how many women lose their virginity to a doctor at a routine check up (not through monkey business)? Is there mourning or what after this? Some women aren’t capable of the marital deed without going to a doctor and getting a little adjustment down there.

Surely there should be some sort of ritual to memorialize this event?

What’s it like losing your virginity to a machine in a doctor’s office? Where’s the romance? Where’s the love? Where’s the holiness? Does the doctor call you later?

Hey lesbos, what counts as losing your virginity for a lesbian?

* A friend complains that all the IQ tests online promoting themselves as free are scams. I told her it is an IQ test to find the legit ones.

* So this 25 yo blonde Jewess tells me she doesn’t trust Richard Lynn’s data.

* If I were on a jury, and one side was Middle Eastern, I’d be prejudiced to think that this person was not telling the truth.

* The idea of keeping somebody waiting causes me great anxiety (a result of my WASP upbringing, I think) but I notice that many people around me love doing it because it makes them feel powerful.

Chaim Amalek: “Bill Clinton was well known to keep others waiting, but not as an expression of power. Rather, he often had other business to attend to.”

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Nazism vs Judaism

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Luke Ford

In many ways, Nazism and Judaism are opposites (Judaism posits God and a God-given universal moral code), but in some ways, they mirror each other, such as in their advocacy of ethnic unity, nationalism, particularism, and transcendent purpose.

Humanity won’t thrive without over-arching goals. People are happiest when they are part of a homogeneous community.
A friend says:

If I were you, I would run with this and self-publish a pamphlet on this idea. “Judaism and Nazism: Healing the Divide”; or, “Together at Last”; or “Hitler or HaShem: One Jew’s Comparison”.
One difference is that under Jewish rule, the number of outsiders – Palestinian Arabs – has exploded, whereas under Nazi rule, the number of Jews collapsed.
I think you need to begin presenting these arguments in public forums. Pick sympathetic ones at first, eg., an Orthodox shul on Sunday. “A Special Shiur for Jews and Goyim”

Posted in Jews, Nationalism, Nazi, Whites | Comments Off

Whites Dislike Obama

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

REPORT: White Protestants overwhelmingly disapprove of Obama. White Catholics are slightly above the national White average. White Atheist support for Obama is way above the White average. Those eternal outsiders, the Jews, are the most pro-Obama of all. Hindus and Muslims are wildly supportive of Obama in comparison to any Whites.

Posted in Barack Obama, Jews, Whites | Comments Off

1939 Atlantic Article: ‘I Married A Jew’

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

You could never publish an article like this today, but privately I suspect Jews & non-Jews make these same judgments.

Here are some highlights of the article written by the Gentile wife:

Then my mother pulled out the oldest and bitterest chestnuts that have been hurled against the Jews, accusations as old as the Roman Empire.

‘The Jews are essentially an Oriental race,’ she stormed, ‘East is East, and Jews and Christians cannot really meet any more than Christians and Chinese. Jews are sensual, aggressive, ostentatious, cunning—that is a heritage they can never overcome. They accomplish things in business because they are shrewder than Christians and never hesitate to seize an unfair advantage. They accomplish things in science yes, but mostly windy theories like those of Einstein and Freud. Jewish painters like Picasso and Modigliani are clever but never great. Jews in the theatre—well, you have seen what they have done to Hollywood. The moving pictures are full of sex and sensuality, and cater solely to the Jews’ god, money. Has there ever been a Jew who could approach Beethoven or Raphael? Has there ever…’

It must not be inferred that Mother, because of her German background, was particularly anti-Semitic. I have heard the same things from the lips of plenty of one-hundred-per-cent Americans…

…Ben, poor darling, still has the Jewish hypersensitivity toward all criticism of his race, for which he and his people are not to be blamed. In the beginning he couldn’t take it at all, though he loudly proclaimed that he invited argument, that he wanted to learn the Christian point of view in order to understand more clearly the century-old friction between the two groups.

All right, we would have at it. He would start by saying there was this and that about the Christians that he never could stomach. I would agree with him or condone the matter as the case might be, then point out a few Jewish traits that have irritated Gentiles. The moment I did that, he began to look like a crushed and visual embodiment of the ‘Eli, Eli.’ The least word against anything Jewish he took as a personal criticism of himself. ‘Ben, dear,’ I told him, ‘when you attack the prevalence of crime in America, do you suppose I think that you are implying that I am myself a criminal?’ It took some little time to drive this point home. But then up shot another one. Every criticism of Jewry was a vaunting of Christian superiority. ‘In their hearts most Christians think of us as “dirty Jews,”‘ he mourned…

Ben’s family beams whenever there is mention of such great Jews as Einstein, Epstein, Freud. They nod and smile as if to say, ‘Ah yes, where would the world be today if it had not been for our Jewish greats?’ But never do you hear them speak of Jewish scoundrels or criminals. If you merely mention that So-and-so is a Jew, they suspect you of anti-Semitism.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Jews | Comments Off

Should We Retire The Word ‘Slut’?

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

* RE: Leading Jewish intellectuals. “They’re lost souls. Sodom and gomorrah got the best of them. They’re worshiping a golden calf of hedonism. Everyone on my israel trip was a hedonist. Pretty much everyone. it was depressing. I’m sick of it. I’ve been sick of it for years. I want to have higher evolution not animalistic degradation. “(Friend)

* Regarding those swastikas at UC Davis, a friend says, “Luke believes in free speech.”

* Chaim Amalek: “I have made several attempts to read the Koran over the years, none successful. Is the problem one of language, i.e., that the Koran has no “King James” version that sounds right to Western ears, or is it something else?”

* I had an Orthodox friend who had no problem using “shiksa” and “shaygetz” but he was offended by “Jewess.”

* A Jewess confesses: “My mother let me have my bf in my room in high school and my bf’s mother was outraged and confronted me about it. She was completely flabbergasted by it / me.”

* Non-Orthodox Jews tend to be more permissive than the goyim. My Jewess confesses: “All my old boyfriend’s (shaygetzes) mothers hated me. They thought I was corrupting and sexualizing their sons.”

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* No. It shouldn’t be retired.

In fact, it is becoming the “watchword”, the very word to bludgeon women into some sort of return to anything resembling reasonable behavior.

All men should know the tale tell signs of a slut, both behavioral and structural. Men should know how to glean those “breadcrumbs” she leaves along the path towards the truth of her sexual history from the stories and anecdotes of her past.

And men should be aware that based on that slut behavior, they should understand the bad choices she has made and is capable of continuing to make.

And to understand the enormous jeopardy for divorce that a man places himself in if he is stupid enough to commit to a slut.

And further he should realize the jeopardy both financially, structurally, emotionally, educationally, socially, and culturally that he exposes his future children is he commits to a slut.

And once he determines a woman is a slut, then he should dump her, and when she asks why, he should tell her

“Because you are a slut.”

* In my high school and college days slut was female equivalent of the n-word. Guys only used it among themselves, never among women, and we only used it when the woman was truly a slut. Girls only used it when they were seriously fighting… and after all other non-sexual derogatory terms had been used. There was an odd honor code to it.

* Looks like Columbia’s mattress girl was making it up.

* Classic Joan Rivers joke: “A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she’s a tramp.”

* speaking of tina fey – fat chubby nebbish girl, who lost 40 pounds to be television pretty.
part german, and as she says works with teutonic efficiency. also, virgin until 24/25, only went out with one guy whom she married – the music director on 30 rock.

she was on howard stern recently, where she said gave a very sensible interview of how bad boys didn’t do anything for her at all. i actually get the feeling that she was quite jaded from watching too many girls get easy at various parties. very odd woman there.

* “Slut=a girl that won’t have sex with you but with someone else”

A popular aphorism among feminists, but inaccurate. The improved and reality-conforming version:

Slut = A girl who makes it difficult for more chaste girls to persuade their lovers to commit.

The science, for the sperg-inclined.

In internetland, where fun and games is dissecting large social and sexual trends, the slut theme is bandied about with flair by both sexes, but in the real world where men just want to “drink her milkshake up”, one rarely if ever hears a man toss the slut label directly at a woman. It is mostly women who slander their same-sex competition in that manner.

* Like most of the stuff Steve links to in the NYT, this doesn’t seem like its actual intent is to get people thinking. I just can’t imagine an adult woman, however liberal, asking another “So do you feel that the ability of the word slut to challenge patriarchal paradigms outweighs the microsubjugation of black women who may view it in a different context?” Just as past NYT pronouncements that “the debate on X is over” are all about stopping people from engaging in critical thought, this seems like a preview of an impending decision by people who are qualified in such things. It’s a notice to all the right-thinking feminist hangers-on that there’s a debate about something vaguely vagina-related and that everyone who’s in the know should self-censor until the big muckety-mucks at the top of the feminist food chain pass judgement, at which time the NYT will inform Planet Earth of their momentous ruling.

When a liberal says “We need to have a debate about X”, they generally aren’t using the word debate in the way the rest of us do. It’s kind of like when you’re twelve and your parents say “We need to have a conversation about X”. The actual talk is only going in one direction, and in the end you’ll be expected to tow whatever line your parents lay down. They only go to the trouble of framing it as a conversation out of some respect for your developing critical faculties, but they have no intention of giving you any sort of choice. Hyper-liberal news media basically treats the human race like twelve-year-olds.

The other thing that jumps out at me from the ‘slut-debate’ is that it seems like an effort on the part of feminists to associate their movement with civil-rights/black liberation. If blacks got to have their debate about the N-word, then feminists need to have their debate about some word, however ridiculous, because it associates their struggle with one higher on the victim totem-pole. I imagine that most feminist suffer from victim-envy of blacks. Whether or not this has any relevance to the sobbing tweenager who was just called a slut is neither here nor there.

All this is just a symptom of the fact that the highest virtue of liberalism in 2015 is being offended on behalf of other people who probably aren’t aware that they’re supposed to be offended, but don’t worry because liberals have it covered.

* A slut is a woman who is desperate to find a man who will pop the question. I know this may sound strange to a board with mostly male readers, but most women aren’t natural nymphomaniacs. They’re offering sex for a very particular reason.

The problem is that most sluts have something wrong with them (other than their sluttiness) that gives them a low value on the marriage market. They’re either a little too stupid, poor, crazy, inept, grating, demanding, plain, or just too silly and immature for a guy to make a commitment–and the sluts know it. So the slut keeps offering sex because she thinks she has little else to snag a man with.

Posted in Feminism, Jews | Comments Off

ISIS Burned A Pilot, So What?

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Luke Ford

America fire bombed Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. How is that so very different? The Allies deliberately fire bombed tens of thousands of civilians, cooked them alive. ISIS kills a combatant pilot.

Daily Beast: “ISIS released a video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive—and the murder may have happened weeks before they tried to ransom him for a would-be suicide bomber.”

If Israel or America needs to nuke Iran to survive, they will feel morally justified in nuking Iran.

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Two Hundred Years Together

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Luke Ford

Brian C. Anderson writes about the new biography: Mahoney devotes a chapter to defending Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume history of the relations between Russians and Jews, Two Hundred Years Together, from the accusations of anti-Semitism that some have made against it. The main basis of those charges is Solzhenitsyn’s willingness to discuss—and detail—the “disproportionate” presence of Jews in the early Leninist state’s repression machine. Yet the critics “never really challenge the accuracy of the facts to which Solzhenitsyn draws our attention,” Mahoney observes, which the refuznik Natan Sharansky has pointed out as well. And Solzhenitsyn never blames Jews for the Bolshevik takeover: a tiny Jewish minority could never drag the massive Russian nation into the Communist underworld, he recognizes. Moreover, adds Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn’s study acknowledges the uniqueness of the Holocaust and carefully documents the pogroms and abuses Jews suffered in Russia and the Soviet Union across time. Solzhenitsyn’s purpose in Two Hundred Years Together is simply to encourage both Russians and Jews to take responsibility for the actions of their “renegade” predecessors during the twentieth century. In such mutual repentance, he believed, lay forgiveness. “A fair-minded critic can only conclude that there is nothing anti-Semitic or nationalistic” about Solzhenitsyn’s effort, says Mahoney.

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